Postgraduatedom in Numbers: Week One

After a year of waiting, 3 months of grappling with the Career Development Loan folk, and innumerable visits to the NLS, I began my Masters this week.

There have been 3 lectures.

One assignment sprung on us with very little notice.

45 hours of working at my job because I didn't know that either of the above were happening.

5 6am starts.

3 1am finishes.

1 expletive filled rant.

1 bout of sobbing.

Oh, and 2,323 words on an assignment on Dual Agency and the Evolution of Thought in the Work of Fatima Mernissi.

I'm pretty tired, but I'M BACK, baby.

Erotic Capital: The Rationalisation of Rape

Catherine Hakim, an LSE sociologist has a new book out at the moment: Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital. Nice.

Her basic thesis seems to be that men want sex. More sex than women are prepared to give, and so this provides a bit of a vacuum in which any self-serving women will exploit to her benefit. Apparently women have now noticed that they can use their 'sex-appeal' to get ahead, a fact which the 'patriarchy' has attempted to cover up: "Patriarchal ideologies have systematically trivialised women's erotic capital to discourage women from capitalising on it – at men's expense." You can read a rather fantastic interview with Ms Hakim here.

This theme, that women don't have to go all the way and fulfil men's desires, but only to look pretty and make the guys think they might has been picked up in this jaw-dropping Daily Mail article. Ms Brick is a delightful young women, who is quite happy to spend a large proportion of her time flirting away in order to get exactly what she wants (which it seems is make-up and clothes - a touch of a vicious cycle going on there). Happy days for her. Interesting that last year she wrote this article entitled How TV is run by sexist pigs, where she wrote of how it was only through hard work she got on in her career despite sexual harassment. Anyhoo, it's the Daily Mail so I won't hold her up as an example.

However, Hakim's thesis doesn't just make my blood boil because she is boiling women down to sexual fantasies for men. I think she is pedalling a very dangerous ideology.

I came to this realisation when re-reading Catharine MacKinnon's section on Rape in "Toward a Feminist Theory of the State". She draws on the popular image of women as teases who control their sexuality in terms of consent. Men initiate sex, women consent . The terms of the initiation, consequences of refusal, and the situation a woman is placed in when deciding whether to consent or not are generally ignored. "Fundamentally, desirability to men is supposed a woman's form of power because she can both arouse it and deny its fulfilment". (MacKinnon, 1989:175) However, this notion of women as 'teases' rationalises force. She's stringing him along, thinking she will give in to his desires, but at the last second leaves him standing. Well of course she wants it, hasn't she just been giving all the signals? Perhaps she's trying to get him to work for it. Never do we consider that she actually doesn't want to have sex with him. "Consent in this model becomes more a metaphysical quality of a woman's being than a choice she makes and communicates." (MacKinnon, 1989:175)

Hakim is perpetuating this image of women as teases, even encouraging women to take ownership of her erotic capital and use it for her won ends. Unfortunately she hasn't thought it through. This isn't the dawning of a new feminine overcoming of the patriarchy, but it is lending academic credentials to a dangerous piece of misinformation.

For that reason, Hakim is being damned to my own personal hell, as detailed in previous postshere, here and here.

48 Women an Hour Raped in Congo

It is now two years since I first began studying rape, and over those years I have inevitably come across some awful stories and statistics. Some of them I've published on the blog - from the fact that a South African woman is more likely to be raped than learn to read, to the Pakistani statistic of a woman raped every hour, every second attack is on a minor and every fourth a gang rape. I've raged about defence lawyers' tactics - women wearing skinny jeans couldn't possibly be raped (an Italian example only recently rejected by the courts), women pinned down by the weight of a man is engaged in the missionary position (Assange's lawyers) and the opening gambit of one trial in America a few decades ago where a lawyer span a Cola bottle around and attempted to insert a pencil into the neck. Obviously a woman who doesn't want to be raped can fight back(!) Academic studies which ask women how violent their attack was, delusional muppets claiming to be academics and a textbook which finished a section on sadistic rape with a paragraph on victim impact which began "if the victim survives...".

All terrible things that have led me to rant and rave, and in many cases cry.

But as I stumbled across a Guardian article this afternoon, I had to take a deep breath before reading the article:

Forty-eight women raped every hour in Congo

The systematic use of rape as a weapon of war is not a new discovery, particularly in Congo, but the assertions that rape is beginning to creep outwith the areas of the fiercest conflict and especially into the home are disturbing.

12% of the female population of Congo have been raped, whilst 3% of the female population were raped in a single year between 2006 and 2007, rising to 7% in one province. More than a fifth have been forced to perform sex acts on their partners.

These statistics are even thought by some researchers to even underestimate the problem.

:(

Wet shirts, Incest and Interminable Monologues: Why Jane Austen is Doomed to the 7th Pit of a Fiery Hell

A man in a sodden ruffled shirt doesn't do much for me. I don't think it ever did. However, for many, it has become the iconic scene of a BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. I believe that this is a bit of poetic license on the part of the producers, but I can't know because my mind has blocked all details of Pride and Prejudice from my mind in an attempt to sand-bag my brain from the rot of simpering, marriage obsessed heroines.

Three years ago, I ploughed my way through the inane ramblings of Ms Austen. After all, shouldn't every educated woman list an Austen novel as her favourite book? At first I thought my dislike of the book was a flaw of my own, I wasn't smart enough to appreciate the writing or not romantically-inclined enough to identify with the protagonists. I tried and I tried and I tried to get to grips with Austen. Perhaps it was just Pride and Prejudice that I didn't get on with. So I tried Emma. Just as bad. Sense and Sensibility? Senseless. Mansfield Park? Seriously, incest ain't sexy.

Ah, but it's just a quirk of the time, I hear you say.

Fair enough, but for books taken as the pinnacle of romance, that's a message that makes me vomit a wee bit in my mouth.

And then the writing style... Goodness me there have been telephone books which read better.

But all of this pales in comparison to the realisation I finally came to. There's nothing wrong with me because I don't like Austen, but the societal pressure for young women to like her novels. They aren't very well written and they do go on (and on and on and on and, well you get the picture). But that isn't reason enough to decry Austen - my bug bear is that Austen has become the pinnacle of 'female literature'and their underlying message a stick with which to beat women. Her books have soppy, simpering women devoting ALL of their time to finding a husband, and finding every other woman a husband too, and that is what educated women should aspire to. Women will idealize romance, whilst men can read whatever they want, the very basis of a huge amount of inequality worldwide.

Well screw you Austen, and societal pressure, because you will burn in my imaginary hell.